Our House Construction - Exterior Shell - Page 3
To complete the ring for the end dome of the house (bedroom) we placed our steaks in preparation to drive them into the ground with a jackhammer (don't want them coming out). The steaks hold the inflated airform to the ground so its important that they do not come out and in this clay soil it has not been a problem! Once the steaks are in we attach the plywood so we have a surface to apply the airform to.
Securing the airform with strips of plywood all
the way around the entire ring or exterior surface
of the dome.
The attachment is complete and ready to go!
The Switch box that starts it all
(just thought it would be cool to include
even this detail.
The inflation begins!
Hang on! That wind is whipping up!
Getting there if one of the
guysdon't become airborne first!
Fully inflated! What a beautiful site!
All 5 domes in a row (another beautiful site).
Night time shot with lights in it. This is cool! You can see it for miles! Wonder what the neighbors think?
A couple of cool shots of the dome being lit from the inside. Tomorrow it will get foamed so this is the only chance we get to lighting up. Wonder what it would look like if we could light up all 7 at once?
Its starting to take shape! This picture is what you presently see as you enter the valley an is about a mile away. Hey! Who thinks he is
the cartoonist?

But thanks for the positive words!
Making the openings (blocking out) in the house shell!
Mert & Ray - that piece of foam board can't be that heavy! :-)
OK it our pattern of the curves we are using for the large openings.
(right) Trever is tracing it onto the dome so we will know what to block out so we don't spray concrete into that area. It would be tough to make an opening if its filled with concrete!
Sample of an opening traced on the wall plus the
electrical prep on its right side.
Mert using a jig saw to follow the line of an opening.
We used two jig saws to cut the outlines of the openings.
One set at 90 degrees and the second set at an angle so
we could make the tops of the openings flat or level
versus 90 degrees to the dome surface. We felt that this
would look better on the finished openings
.
Sample of the finished block outs. we used 4 different lengths of sheet metal. All where 5" wide and the lengths where 12", 14", 18" and 24". This allowed us to make a real clean curve where we also change the angle across the tops.
Close ups of a couple of corners. This method works great for the rectangle cutouts also. Just duct tape (what else) the corners to hold them together.
Now some foam on the inside to support and anchor it and we are ready! Man that's a fast way to do your block-outs!